


coping mechanisms

by mazabm



Category: King Falls AM (Podcast)
Genre: Anxiety Disorder, Character Study, Found Family, Gen, Implied/Referenced Alcohol Abuse/Alcoholism, Platonic Relationships, References to Depression, Spoilers up to 84, Therapy, Trauma, Unhealthy Coping Mechanisms, heavy handed platonic soulmates
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-07-29
Updated: 2019-07-29
Packaged: 2020-07-25 12:56:40
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,133
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20026204
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/mazabm/pseuds/mazabm
Summary: Ben tries to remember that out of the three of them, Ben, Sammy and Emily, he’s the one that’s managing the best, coping the best, making the best out of an awful situation. But then Lily ends up on his couch and he realizes that they’reallso fucked up, it’s almost funny.Or the Ben character study disguised as Ben going to therapy absolutely no one asked for





	coping mechanisms

**Author's Note:**

> P R O J E C T I O N!  
warnings in end notes

Sometime after the Void rejects Sammy, and Ben thinks he will lose his best friend, after Sammy moved in and never left his room, and Ben paced outside of it knowing Sammy could hear him worry, when they’re back in the new spaceship of the studio, still too early for them to feel like this is normal.

Ben, not Benny except for Emily, goes, “After all this, Merv should pay for our therapy.” It’s not a good joke and Sammy, not Sam, chuckles too dry to be real and goes ”Yeah.”

Neither of them talks about the therapy that occurred in the months between the destruction of their studio to the brand new one for a long time. 

There a few things Ben absolutely knows to be a fact. 

Ben knows Sammy only moved in because he had to. He had a dream, once, of him and Sammy moving in together and having the best best friend pad ever. It was his cumulative attempt to get Sammy to stay. The reality is Sammy’s lease expired because he wasn’t planning to renew and he doesn’t leave his room except to eat and he does so as quietly as a cat. He could fit everything he had in three large boxes and he moves in so fast Ben barely helps. That doesn’t mean Ben doesn’t try to get him out of the house.

“Let’s go to Rose’s, let’s go for a walk, let’s go,”. Sammy turns him down every time. Ben tried to pretend like he isn’t hurt, the way he tries to pretend his hands aren’t shaking after he finds himself unable to sleep. 

Sammy comes out at 5 A.M once and sees Ben. They lock eyes, Sammy with the saddest expression on his face. They don’t talk about it. Two radio hosts and they don’t talk about anything. 

Here’s something else Ben’s known for a considerable amount of time in his life, ADHD and anxiety symptoms go hand in hand. 

“You know,” Emily says, holding his hand, and he’s still getting used to it. “Sammy is showing clear depression symptoms.” 

Ben is not an idiot, he knows his best friend refuses to drink (and hasn’t drunk since the Sammiversary all those years ago) and doesn’t talk about why. He knows having a lack of will to do anything kinda floats in the realm of fucking depression but he’s not sure what to do about it.

“It’s not like I can stage an intervention, you know? Sammy’s so..” Private. Or at least he was before fucking Frickard and even Lily started talking all over the place. He knows things about Sammy now he would have never asked before all that shit went down. It feels almost voyeuristic, Sammy had to share all that stuff, didn’t really get to choose to do so. 

“You don’t have to,” Emily says, leaning her head back against the blanket. They’re on a date (on a date!) on the docks, food, blanket, still waters. At least one person died here he thinks absentmindedly. “Sammy’s a grown man and he knows we love him and we’re there for him but if you want to gently nudge him towards going to see someone, you can.”

Neither of them says it, the whole storm cloud hanging above them that is the “what if Sammy is suicidal” with circumstantial evidence he kinda refuses to think about on principle. 

“And maybe you might think about seeing someone too?” Emily says but with a question at the end so he doesn’t feel pressured. Emily, who dealt with gaslighting and missing memories by picking her own therapist after weeks of research and digitizing archives until her fingers fall off.

They’re all probably textbook bad coping mechanisms one after the other but they’re trying. 

“I don’t have time for that.” He says, and she just looks at him for a long quiet moment. The station burned down with half of his formative years trapped inside. He’s got time for days. He spends it thinking about the void, the science institute, fucking zombies, even Jack in the Box Jesus and whatever the Reverend is planning with him. He thinks about Jack, Sammy’s Jack. He thinks about calling Lily who stayed in the town adjacent even after her crew left,a familiar lost expression on her face. Okay, so he thinks about Jack a lot. He wants to know what he ate, his favorite color, what was in his notebook the day he up and vanished. He knows the moment Sammy sees the new notebook, the man is gonna leave and not come back and it worries him more than he would like to admit. Okay, he has all the time in the world and going to a therapist would be great, would be smart. But, no buts.

“The best thing we can do for Sammy besides getting Jack back? Make sure we’re okay.” He’s got the smartest girlfriend in the world. 

It’s baby steps getting to therapy. 

His mom is and always has been a preacher of the gospel that is “Making sure you’re self-aware, Ben Arnold.” He’s always thought he was good at it, he knew he held grudges like a bitch, had a brief bout of stage anxiety in middle school that he literally tricked himself out of, he knew that he liked boys and girls from reading a post on someone’s shitty Tumblr blog and when the world started to close in, he knew twenty different ways to make sure it would expand again. And then he and Sammy are on air as a UFO abducts Emily as she screams his name, begging him to help her and all twenty of those ways disappear.

Unsurprisingly, the first thing he tells Doctor Chrome (real name, google checked out, weird in a King Falls type weird okay since he is too) is about the radio station. He worried at first he would have to teach her about racism and homophobia and how the world is finally starting to work in 2018 and mentally cringed at the thought of having to do the work but she’s not that much older than him (he thinks because it’s never polite to ask a woman her age) and she gets all his meme references. It’s nice, she directs the conversation because Ben’s a rambler and always has been. 

He talks about Emily, a lot. Doesn’t talk about being worried that he fucked up and brought a robot Emily back or even how sometimes she says or does things that she can’t explain. He talks about being worried that he sounds like Frickard, that’s he will say something and Emily will look at him and she won’t recognize him. He gets worried she will get annoyed one day with the notebooks and the worrying that she’ll leave him and he will have to let her go. 

“I really fucked up, you know, before she was,” and he trails off and the good doctor doesn’t prod, doesn't need to. Emily Potter, missing for a year and some change, was news outside of their little radio. “And I wonder if she even really remembers it, if she even really forgave me.”

He wants to talk to her about Sammy, wants to say out loud to someone. “I think my best friend is super depressed and willing to kill himself if we don’t get his fiancé out of a Void we know nothing about, and it scares the hell out of me.” He wants to talk about how he worries about the Science Institute and the Himinists and HB3 getting revenge on them. He wants to talk about how he worries about all this shit in his town that before Shotgun Sammy showed up he ignored. He wants to talk about how he worries so much he can’t sleep anymore and eating is hard if Sammy doesn’t stress cook. He doesn’t say any of that though and Doctor Chrome doesn’t push, not for a long time. 

Ben tries to remember that out of the three of them, Ben, Sammy and Emily, he’s the one that’s managing the best, coping the best, making the best out of an awful situation. But then Lily ends up on his couch and he realizes that they’re _ all _so fucked up, it’s almost funny. 

“I think Lily’s an alcoholic.” Lily is easier to talk about than Sammy because she went from Pedestal to older slightly scary equal. She’s not the crushing best friend-brother-soul that Sammy is, she’s the problem sleeping in his couch and stealing into Sammy’s bed when he’s not there. The problem who argues with Sammy when all the bottles she brought are found empty, who hasn’t gotten so drunk she can’t walk in weeks but gets narrowly close to the edge. “And I think Sammy used to be, but he doesn’t really talk about it.” Sammy doesn’t talk about anything unless the world is going to end, he doesn’t say. 

He doesn’t say “I think Jack made them better and they’re finally dealing with their grief” 

He doesn’t say “I don’t know how I ever compared to a guy that apparently hung the sun.”

He doesn’t say “If we get Jack back are they going to leave me like everyone else does?” 

Okay, so Ben has abandonment issues which is bad because that’s lined up firmly with issues that dad probably caused and they don’t talk about his dad. As far as anyone is aware, Ben Arnold popped out fully formed from his mother’s head and he’s just _ like that._

Doctor Chrome doesn’t really push, she asks about his mother, the woman who let her son have an illegal pet until Gunderson, well, anyway. He doesn't think about Gunderson unless it's to think about how everyone thinks they're safe from police brutality until they're not. He doesn't think about how red and blue lights make him nervous and how his mother sat him down in middle school to warn him to stay out of trouble least he end up dead. His mother who raised him with his grandfather and loves him so much and worries about him the same way he worries. His mother who told him point blank when Emily was missing that he hadn’t allowed himself to get this bad in years and needed to get himself together before he got hurt. The mother that helped hold him together when Emily didn’t know who he was. He didn’t need his father, not when he had her. 

And he’s not a fucking baby, okay, he doesn’t have separation anxiety even if the thought of Sammy leaving him again makes him want to throw up. 

He wants to clarify that Doctor Chrome helps; she teaches him new coping mechanisms that might work; she gives him a new notebook, tells him it’s only for him, no theories, just him. She refers him to a psychiatrist who takes one look at the cocktail he’d been on since the shitty college doctor gave him something to “chill the fuck out” and starts gently trying to move him to something new. 

Ben tries to remember that out of them, Ben, Sammy, Emily and Lily, he is doing the best, the absolute best he can. He will save Jack, he will figure out where the rainbow lights came from and how to make sure they never take anyone again. He’s going to keep his best friend here, on this plane of existence.

He’s losing his fucking mind, and he gets angry sometimes because four, five years ago, he was okay; he had everything under control and then Sammy Stevens showed up and changed everything. 

He gets really sad sometimes because Sammy meant everything he said before he almost got abducted by rainbow lights. He meant “go live a long happy life that I can’t have, that I don’t want if I don’t have Jack” and the idiot doesn’t realize that Ben doesn’t want shit if he’s not there. 

He gets thrilled sometimes when he’s sitting in a booth at Roses and Emily is pressed on his side and Sammy is next to her and Troy sits across from him, Lily squished between him and Katie. He thinks he was really fucking lonely five years ago, and that’s not the anxiety and whatever else is inside of him talking. He thinks he was really fucking lonely because no one else got him in a long time the way they got him, the way Sammy, Emily, Lily, and Troy got him. The way he knows without a shadow of a doubt that Jack is gonna have him.

Doctor Chrome thinks he’s doing very well.

“It’s about developing a new normal Ben, not trying to keep an old one that doesn’t fit anymore.” 

Fin. 

**Author's Note:**

> Ben’s therapist never really pushes because Ben comes into therapy going “I have anxiety, I take meds and I cope, but lately those haven’t been working as well and I know exactly when and why it hasn’t gone back to normal,” it’s not exactly great, she helps him learn new ways of coping and gives him recommendations on handling the land mines that are the rest of the Scooby Doo gang.  
This focuses on Ben but warnings for:  
Lily’s Alcoholism  
Sammy’s depression  
Emily’s history of a abusive gaslighting asshole
> 
> also this was unbeta(d)  
writing tumblr:
> 
> [Bloodbendingbabe](https://bloodbendingbabe.tumblr.com/)


End file.
